A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1944Quotes
The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
—Dean Acheson, 1970There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.
—Walter Bagehot, 1863Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.
—Charles de Gaulle, 1963I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.
—George Borrow, 1843Politics is the art of the possible.
—Otto von Bismarck, 1867It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, c. 1515I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.
—John Maynard Keynes, 1917You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
—Mario Cuomo, 1985Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
—E.B. White, 1944People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.
—Robert Byrd, 2005I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!
—George H. W. Bush, 1990